Offshore, Out of Mind?

As one of the only people I’ve ever met who has actually reported a “Do Not Call” List violation to the FCC, I noted a story in the Associated Press wire feed last week about a case in Pennsylvania involving half a million of them…

The AP is reporting that Pennsylvania’s Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against a company based in Baltimore that supposedly hired a telemarketing call center located in India to make calls to over 500,000 homes in Pennsylvania, regardless of whether those numbers were on the Do Not Call list or not. The calls were made by or on behalf of a company called Direct Leadsource, and were apparently part of an ongoing campaign to market mortgage loans. If you’re thinking that it would be unwise to try a stunt like these during a time when four states have started lawsuits to punish predatory lenders, you’re quite right. If you’re thinking that Pennsylvania has been hit hard by the current economic downturn and is unlikely to take kindly to this sort of scheme, you would be right again. It would not have taken more than a few people complaining to the FCC and local authorities to bring on this type of action…

Even worse, the company responsible for all of this is not registered as a telemarketer in the State of Pennsylvania, nor is it licensed to sell mortgage loans in that state. What on Earth made them think they could get away with this nonsense is still unknown, but there has been speculation that they might have thought that because the call center was overseas, the calls would not fall under the jurisdiction of any U.S. authorities. If so, this strategy does not seem to be working. Each violation of the Do Not Call list can carry a fine of up to $10,000, which means that the total bill for this escapade could be as much as $5,000,000,000. That’s $5 billion, folks; almost certainly enough to bankrupt the company…

Which is probably as far was this case will go, when all’s said and done. If Direct Leadsource is a corporation (and the people running it would have to be out of their tiny little minds to try this with any other corporate structure) then it probably doesn’t have any assets as such, and will simply be forced out of business. The idiots behind this outrage will just declare bankruptcy, fold their tent, and go try the same thing somewhere else. Unless, of course, they can come up with a better scam, and try that instead. In fact, I strongly suspect that was the idea all along; the people behind this enterprise probably figured to use the off-shore call center to do the telemarketing, scoop up all of the money they could from the unsophisticated, the naïve and the stupid, and then abandon the operation to bankruptcy when somebody called them on it…

It’s a pity there’s no corresponding criminal statute to prosecute them on, but if there was I imagine we would have heard about it by now. Maybe in the future we can pass laws that will keep miscreants from using the protection of the corporate veil to skate free of the consequences of their actions. Maybe we can include a provision in the upcoming laws about predatory lending that criminalizes this practice where mortgages are involved, and work our way out from there. Maybe we can allow the Attorney General in this case (and similar ones in the future) to sue the overseas call center for their part in the scam, and freeze their assets until they pay up – which should keep any other overseas companies from participating in this sort of scam in the future…

Or maybe we could just outlaw telemarketing calls and have done with it. After all, most of these sorts of scam are on email now anyway…